How to track the big stuck boat

By wazup on March 25, 2021 Comments Closed / 76 views

There’s a giant cargo ship stuck in the Suez Canal. I’m sure you’ve heard, but in case you haven’t, welcome to the first major spectacle the internet has collectively rubbernecked to this degree since those llamas cavorted around an Arizona town in… 2015? Really? Woof.

Anyway, the whole internet loves the stuck boat, especially since it also appears to have charted a very phallic course into the canal before it drifted into its current position. Sure, it’s causing hundreds of other ships to bottleneck, and sure, that will probably inevitably cause some headaches for an already-strained global supply chain. Yes, oil prices are up, and there may be another run on toilet paper as a result, but for now, let us just have this moment, okay?

Stuck boat memes abound, but if you want to keep the closest eye on the beached MV Ever Given, you have a few options. Incredibly, there is no live stream (or even an old-school webcam), so you’ll have to get a bit creative.

My go-to so far has been MyShipTracking, which is basically a version of FlightRadar24 for boats. You get a top-down interactive map to play around with that is updated in near real time, so you can watch all of the little tug and support boats helplessly swarm around the MV Ever Given or check out all of the other ships stuck waiting (or watch them finally decide to bail and go around Africa instead). It also has the easiest access I’ve found to highlight a ship’s prior track, so you can quickly scour the different paths the various boats took to get to this new dead end.

VesselFinder is another good option with similar capabilities. VesselFinder is also seizing its moment by creating stuck boat content on YouTube, where it has reanimated the cargo ship’s dick-drawing skills as well as its ill-fated passage through the canal.

The Suez Canal Authority has uploaded a few incredibly dramatic videos of the big boat, and I applaud any effort by them to create more.

Then there are the satellite companies, which often take opportunities like this to show off what their tech is capable of, like Capella Space’s eerie radar images of the very stuck boat or Airbus Space’s incredible high-res shots.

So buckle up, folks. The effort to float the big boat and get it moving again could take days, maybe even weeks. Enjoy the memes while they last.